There used to be a weird law in New York City; no person of
the Hebrew faith could take charity from a Christian, they could only be a
burden to their own people. Peter Stuyvesant made that law in the Colonial era,
because he didn’t want Spanish Jewish refugees from Brazil coming in (he didn’t
like any other minority, for that matter) and becoming parasites (New Amsterdam
had its share of layabouts.) Few Jews complained, they did okay without
Christian handouts. But keep in mind that that Jewish people, in any city
worldwide, have a network of mutual support and benevolent societies. A lot of
people do not.
Ralph Da Costa Nunez, a Columbia University professor, has
written The Poor Among Us as a
history book about New York City, but specifically about how we take care of
the poor. He divides it into general eras; the Colonial days, the industrial
age, post US Civil War, the progressive era, the Depression, post WW2, and so
on. With each age in our history, he shows how poverty reflected the economics
of the time. Take for instance in the 1700’s, it was the churches that were
empowered to remove children from their families. There were poor families, of
that there’s no doubt, but there were not as many. Irish immigration hadn’t yet
swamped the city, and even after it did, there were still jobs. Today there’s
NYCHA, homeless shelters, and food stamps, but in the 1700’s, it was unheard
of. Where would the colony have gotten the money to pay for it?
In the chapter on Catholic and Jewish charities, I could see
another comparison between the ages. The Jewish and Catholic orphan societies
weren’t based on altruism as much as avoiding embarrassment. The established
Jews and Irish didn’t want the new arrivals to create an image of backwardness,
so they said “we’ll pay for their education,” and the effort altogether worked.
The kids got regular classes, plus job training, and it worked so well because
there were jobs for printers, shoemakers, dressmakers, tailors, etc. But today,
it won’t work. The industries are gone, and shoes and dresses are made in
China. Take for example the animator Ralph Bakshi; he went to the High School
of Art and Design, learned cartooning, and got a job in animation. But today
animation is computerized, and there are fewer jobs in the field. That high
school served a purpose in that it supplied people for jobs in commercial art,
but that’s no longer the case. There’s less demand now for commercial
illustrators.
This book is well-researched, and I applaud the massive
number of primary sources that he managed to locate. I also appreciate how he
doesn’t blame the government or racism for everything. Most of the blame falls
on economics, and when government is blamed, it’s usually for lack of
foresight. New York City never considered what would happen if the jobs
vanished from the garment district, nor did they consider the effect of rising
heating costs. For the last decade the city never considered the effect of a
power outage in the Metro North railway and….oh wait, they had a power shutdown
in 2013! People couldn’t get to work. But didn’t we have a transit strike in
2005? Right before Christmas? Do I recall huge traffic snarls that made the
Queens-Manhattan drive a two hours slog?
I don’t necessarily agree with those fanatics who say we
should “prepare for doomsday,” but I do think we need to be ready for a transit
strike, garbage strike, school bus driver strike, rising fuel cost, etc. All
these things will come down hard on the families that already struggle. Then
again, politicians never really learn from mistakes, now do they?
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